China’s precious children

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Corinne Hua, Lidan Lyu, Tim Oakes, Yuan Ren, Qingfang Wang and Xiaxia Yang for their useful comments and suggestions, and Yvonne Chan for producing Figure 1.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Added to those, China also lost about 30 million people in the early 1960s to a cataclysmic famine, the largest in the 20^th C.

2. Almost all new couples in urban areas were required to have only one child per couple, though most rural couples were actually allowed to have two children; some even more.

3. Defined as such when the population of age 60 and over reaches 10% of the total. China reached that in 2000 when its GDP per capita was only 7% of what Japan’s when it also crossed the same threshold (UNFPA 2018).

4. The crude marriage rate dropped from 9.9/1000 in 2013 to only 7.7/1000 in 2017 (MCA 2018).

5. The low dependency ratio (e.g. 27.1 for the entire population of Beijing in 2017) is deceptive because most of the dependent population of the young migrant population in Beijing do not reside in the city. A meaningful dependency ratio for Beijing is one for the local hukou population, whose elderly percentage is much higher. For comparison, the total dependency ratio of the hukou population of Beijing in 2017 was 41.6, indicating a far greater burden of dependency (BBS various years, Table 3–9). If we broaden the elderly to include those aged 60–64 (60 is a common retirement age for most local hukou population), the total dependency ratio of Beijing’s hukou population would surge to 57.2 for 2016, more than twice of that for the entire population (“Beijingshi Hukou … ” 2017).

6. All the statistics about Beijing used in this paper pertains to the whole administrative area of Beijing. This area contains a population slightly larger than what is defined on a “metropolitan area” concept. See Wang and Chan (2014).

7. Other measures range from the appeal for patriotism, monetary incentives for births, to limiting access to abortion (Myers and Ryan 2018; Myers and Fu 2019).

8. See discussions in Chan (2007) and Cui (2017) for a treatment of this problem in China’s urban definitions.

9. The size of the LBMC population in 2010 was 13.1 million (NHFPC 2018, 140), rising to 18.8 million in 2015 (Table 2).

10. A detailed comparison of these figures is in Chan and Ren (2018, Table 3).

11. The Chinese figure is based on the percentage of family households. Strictly, it is not exactly the same as (but close to) the percentage of children reported in Chamie (2016).

12. Such as Mozambique (36%), Dominican Republic (35%), Liberia (31%) and Kenya (30%) as reported by Chamie (2018).

13. The US percentage will be higher if we include children placed in foster care due to their parental substance abuse (Riley 2019).

14. Siu and Unger (2019) also note that Vietnam has a much lower percentage of LBC. Though Vietnam also implements a hukou-like system, migrant children are often allowed to go with their parents in the big cities and access education.

15. Beijing’s TFR was about 0.7 in 2010. The number of births in 2011–2017 steadily increased but peaked in 2017, partly also a result of a larger prime reproductive cohort in the age 25–35. The number dropped by almost 20% in 2018 (BMHC 2019). It is expected that the TFR will remain around 1.1 (2015 level) for the coming years and decades (BFPC 2012).

16. This is partly attributed to the shrinkage of China’s children population in general (see Duan, Xie and Lye 2019).

17. A smaller representative survey in 2006 reports a percentage of 50% in Beijing (Yang and Duan 2007).

18. For example, the comparable figure for the same age 0–14 group in Hong Kong in 2011 is 12.9% despite Hong Kong’s population being older than Beijing’s. The median age of Hong Kong’s population was 41.7 in 2011 while Beijing’s was only 35.7 in 2010 (HKCSD 2012; Beijing Census Office 2011).